In 2002 my class in IIT Delhi was sent to Pune to take part in an ‘Industrial Trip’. It was the kind of expedition that comes armed with capital letters. A necessary part of growing up to become a virtuous mechanical engineer, and an appropriate choice in some ways. A group of confused engineering students just learning they didn’t want to do engineering much longer, invading an overcrowded town just beginning to understand what being a small city really meant.
Typically, we were distracted and inattentive and on the way to the rather grandly named Forbes-Marshall manufacturing unit, a group of us decided to slip away. Four boys, three pairs of steel framed spectacles, clutching a paper bag full of warm breakfast buns. They don’t make quite the same thing in this country, plain bread with sweet fruit bits in them. You dip them in tea or eat them with butter and when it’s raining outside they bring laughter to the soul. But I digress. This is not a story about factories, nor one about breakfast buns.
We hitched a ride in a truck carrying hay and ended up in the little pocket of first world affluence that surrounds Pune’s Osho ashram. Evidently global citizens in search of spirituality, like their brethren in Armani suits, prefer to fly business class. The incongruence of wealth aside, there was the illicit attraction of stories of sex and drugs, the color of red robes topped by blonde hair, white tunics over dark brown skin. Archers on the wet green lawns, and a cloud of blue incense smoke cutting through the winter air.
And outside, in the world of the sane, an outpost of itinerant wanderers. Bamboo roof, long dark wooden tables and air you could cut with a knife. Coffee, beer, ganja and cigarettes – seasoning the thick heady scent of fresh baked bread. The air outside was cold but the crowded café was warmed by food, by drink, by human bodies. It should have been in a Terry Pratchett novel, perhaps I just caught the German Bakery at a good time, but you couldn’t help looking around for a female werewolf and an incompetent magician sharing a mug of dark beer and a glucose biscuit.
In the hour that I sat there, a girl threw a coffee mug at someone across the room (she missed). A couple of young americans sat around eating brownies (yes maybe they were, I didn’t try any). The long haired spaniard next to me spoke of how he came to paint two years ago and never left, hugging his indian friend close. She looked like she was leaving behind a conservative family in south India for a few months of secret hedonism. Kajal paired with a nose stud, framed by curls held in check by a red headscarf. I remember thinking she was pretty and feeling vaguely resentful at the firangi, arriving to steal our women away.
Not just artists and international seekers of spirituality and yoga of course. Also college kids from nearby – middle class India reading books in the sun. Listening to Arundhati Roy turning words to music in their minds, Ayn Rand in the afternoon, perhaps Jeffrey Archer. Not to forget, Gabriel Garcia, essential accessory to the intellectual equivalent of the idle rich. Today you’d need a Mac and a Moleskine (™x2). What was I holding in my hands I wonder? Perhaps Wodehouse. I hope so. More likely Marquez though sadly.
Spaces where different tongues can speak of things that do not matter, with words that didn’t need to be said. Where the murmur of conversation is a rainbow colored tapestry. Where French touches Hindi and both become the sound of the sea. The world does not have enough of those places. Mourn the German Bakery attacks. Because long after the dead have been buried and bread is being baked again, a skeletal man in dark robes plays chess in that corner you can’t quite see from where you’re sitting.
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